TIL about latexmk (which I gather is a perl script that handles a lot of the latex build deps, like running bibtex at the right time(s), for you automatically), thanks!
I never really understood most of the TeX world. I cargo-culted the bits I needed to make:
* articles for journal submissions (easy, they all provided packages or templates),
* my thesis (somebody had written a latex class that took care of all the school's formatting requirements a ~decade prior), and
* a resume,
and never dug into the differences between tex, latex, miktex, texlive, auctex, lyx, pdftex, xetex, luatex etc etc etc etc etc.
I never really understood most of the TeX world. I cargo-culted the bits I needed to make:
* articles for journal submissions (easy, they all provided packages or templates),
* my thesis (somebody had written a latex class that took care of all the school's formatting requirements a ~decade prior), and
* a resume,
and never dug into the differences between tex, latex, miktex, texlive, auctex, lyx, pdftex, xetex, luatex etc etc etc etc etc.
I was just to ask you if you knew of a 40000-foot overview of these kinds of things but stumbled across this article over at Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Articles/What%27s_in_a_... , it looks pretty apropos.